Trump will accuse the Chinese of meddling in the US election in the first speech, sources said
Part of President Trump’s speech Thursday night is expected to touch on allegations of previous Chinese interference in the US election, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Part one: Allegations that Beijing compromised US voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the operation and did not share that information with Mr. Trump in his first term.
The audience for the first speech is expected to include members of the president’s Cabinet. Among those invited are the heads of the CIA, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as other agencies and staff. Some Cabinet members will not be present due to scheduling conflicts.
Asked to comment on the content of the president’s speech, White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt said: “As always, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech Thursday evening. The truth is, no one knows what President Trump will say in the end, so everyone should listen.”
Mr. Trump announced the first speech earlier this week and revealed few details about its content, although he indicated it would focus on the election. The president has long insisted – falsely – that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to rampant fraud.
The question of Chinese involvement in the 2020 election has drawn debate.
In an early 2021 assessment released by the National Intelligence Council, the American intelligence community assessed with “high confidence” that China did not try to influence the election, when Beijing decided that neither Biden nor Trump would win “it was not profitable enough for China to risk being caught interfering.” Intelligence agencies also found that China did not “interfere with the election infrastructure,” including the counting of votes.
But the assessment marks a “minimum view” from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who believed with “moderate confidence” that China tried to “undermine” Mr. Trump for re-election in 2020, mainly through social media and official statements. The official admitted, however, that the Chinese government did not try to interfere with the “election process.”
Separately, the National Cyber Intelligence Service found in April 2020 that Chinese intelligence was “analyzing multiple US states’ … election voter registration data,” according to a report on Chinese and Russian exploitation of US data that was declassified in 2022 but heavily redacted. The report suggested that China’s purpose in analyzing voter registration data was to “analyze public opinion about the 2020 US general election.”
The April 2020 report does not say how China accessed the voter registration data, or how sensitive the data was. In most states, limited voter registration data is publicly available, although some data is confidential. The unedited parts of the document do not accuse China of trying to falsify data or interfere with election processes.
Beyond China, the National Intelligence Council’s 2021 assessment found that Russia tried to undermine the Biden campaign and Iran tried to undermine the Trump campaign, but neither country tried to attack the election infrastructure.
The report found “no indications” that any foreign actors attempted to change voter registration, voting, vote counting or any other “technical aspect” of the 2020 election process.
“We assess whether it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate electoral processes on a large scale without being detected by the intelligence community on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election research,” the report reads.
